Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) is increasingly being deployed and offered as a service for delivering streaming media content over digital networks such as the Internet.
However, delivering high-quality streaming media content presents a number of challenges, due to the divergence between, on the one hand, the often large sizes of media content items and the requirement for continuous data flow, and, on the other hand, the need to conserve network bandwidth.
Content distribution networks (CDNs) provide one way of addressing some of these challenges. Broadly speaking, CDNs consist of edge servers and origin servers. The edge servers, which can store part or all of the content held by the origin servers, distribute content to clients. However, this leads to additional challenges, in particular how best to allocate requests of clients to the edge servers.
Load balancing is a technique that spreads requests across multiple servers, so that no individual server becomes overloaded. Numerous algorithms have been proposed, the simplest of which comprise random allocation, in which any available server is picked randomly from among the servers, and round-robin allocation, in which available servers are picked on a rotating basis. More advanced load balancing schemes also exist, but often these are implemented at the expense of increased complexity.
It would, therefore, be desirable to provide improved techniques of redirecting client requests for content to a server.